How to Defeat These Thoughts: The Questions of Wallace Shawn

[This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2009/2010 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books. The Winter 2010/2011 issue has been published, so I'm now free to reprint this essay, and I'll also recommend the new issue to you, because in addition to the wide-ranging reviews of books, there are also good interviews with William Gibson and Lewis Hyde.]

ANDRE: Well, Wally, how do you think it affects an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can't reach each other, and their lives are obsessive and driven and desperate?  Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events and violence and terror?  Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? 

—Wallace Shawn & Andr矇 Gregory, My Dinner with Andr矇

1.
Wallace Shawn's most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, is a dream and a provocation and a conundrum, but most of all, it is a culmination: if all of Shawn's previous plays were to sit down and write an autobiography, this is what it might look like.

Wallace Shawn at The Quarterly Conversation

I'm happy whenever one of my favorite playwrights, Wallace Shawn, gets some attention.  Andrew Ervin has written an interesting personal essay at The Quarterly Conversation about Shawn and white privilege, his thoughts sparked by Shawn's latest publications, Essays and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

I wrote about those two books and Shawn's whole career as a writer for the most recent print issue of Rain Taxi.  While you'll have to get your hands on the dead tree magazine itself to read it all (for now), here are three paragraphs from it to whet your appetite...

Rain Taxi Auction

Rain Taxi Review of Books is a marvelous magazine, and they've just begun their annual auction, which is an event I always look forward to because of the wide variety of items they have to offer, including dozens of signed books.

The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.

Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".

Radio Play: The Designated Mourner

First, obviously, I ate the cake. And then I grabbed some matches which sat nearby me, and I glanced around, and I lit the bit of paper. "I am the designated mourner," I said.

The bit of paper wasn't very big, but it burned rather slowly, because of the cake crumbs. I thought I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floor -- plummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell. He name, once said by so many to be "immortal," would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting: forgetting his name, forgetting him, and forgetting all the ones who remembered him.

I'm working on an essay for Rain Taxi about the plays and essays of Wallace Shawn (in my opinion, one of the great writers of our time), and via a link in this profile/interview, I discovered that WNYC produced an uncensored radio version of Shawn's greatest play, The Designated Mourner, in 2002, and that that radio version is available as streaming audio here on the intertubes.

And we're not talking just any radio version -- this one is done under the direction of Andre Gregory using the cast of his 2000 production: Wallace Shawn, Shawn's longtime companion Deborah Eisenberg (herself among the greatest short story writers alive), and the excellent Larry Pine (best known to me for his magnificent performance as Dr. Astrov in Gregory's Uncle Vanya, filmed by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street, in which Shawn played Vanya). The Gregory production of the play is, in some circles at least, legendary, especially since it seemed impossible to get tickets if you were mortal (yes, I tried, and, being mortal, failed). Tickets were especially difficult to get because the play was performed for an intimate audience -- I've heard there were chairs for about 30 people -- and the run was not particularly long.

So huge kudos to WNYC for the radio version. It's different in tone and rhythm from the original 1996 production, directed and later filmed by David Hare, and Shawn is not as varied and compelling a performer as Mike Nichols was in the lead role of Jack, but Eisenberg gives a vastly more interesting performance than Miranda Richardson and Pine is different from but at least the equal to David de Keyser. The voices and deliveries of Shawn, Eisenberg, and Pine are more noticeably balanced in Gregory's version of the plan than in Hare's -- Shawn performs the lines with stagy deliberation in his famous syrupy, high-pitched voice; Eisenberg's voice is more ethereal, distanced, portentous, like a voice in a memory or a dream; Pine is the only one who sounds at least marginally ordinary and human, which is particularly ironic given how Jack portrays Howard as such a disconnected elitist. It's a more coherent and equitable production than Hare's (the film, at least), where Mike Nichols gave such an astounding performance that the other actors struggled to keep up with him.

Shawn's plays from Aunt Dan & Lemon on have contained more monologues than dialogue (and The Fever is entirely a monologue), and none rely on complex sets, so they are well served as radio plays. The Designated Mourner especially so; it burrows into your mind and imagination.

By the way, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn's new play -- his first since The Designated Mourner -- is strange and fascinating, in many ways a culmination of the themes and motifs he's been playing with for his entire career. It begins as a kind of science fiction story about a man whose invention ruins the food supply of the world, then it becomes an explicitly sexual, utterly surreal, and pretty dark riff on fairy tales (especially "The White Cat") before ending up as an enigmatic and oddly affecting amalgam of both. If Robert Aickman and K.W. Jeter got together to write a play, it might have turned out something like this.

Books Received

The majority of the books I receive from publishers and writers are, unfortunately, not ones that spark my interest. They find homes at local libraries, with more appreciative readers, etc. (unless really desperate for cash, I don't sell books I get for free).

The ones that do, for some reason or another, arouse my curiosity are still more plentiful than I have time for. Consider, for instance, two current piles of books I intend to do more than just glance at the cover and publicity materials for...



And that's just stuff that's arrived in the last few weeks...

Some of these are books I will definitely read -- indeed, one of them, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, I read this past weekend. (Not sure if I'm going to write much about it anywhere, because I had exactly the response M.A. Orthofer had at The Complete Review, and I don't think I have anything to add beyond what he said. But we'll see.) I'm writing a piece for Rain Taxi on Wallace Shawn, so will be plunging into his two, as well as brushing up on all the rest of his books, this week. Beyond that, well...

I'm intrigued by each of the Night Shade books, but am most excited by Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, since I've had a few things to say about his short fiction in the past. I intend to read the others, but if I only get to one of them, it will be The Windup Girl.

The little book on top of one of those piles is an advance copy of The Original Frankenstein from Vintage, and it's an interesting attempt to reconstruct the earliest manuscripts of Frankenstein. Editor Charles E. Robinson seeks to show the exact nature of Percy Shelley's influence on the novel, and makes what appears, at least at first glance, to be a strong case for Percy as a collaborator with his wife on the book. The collaboration is complex, though, and for anyone who has previously been fascinated by the changes between the published editions of Frankenstein, this volume will be essential. As a reading text of the novel, though, it's awkward, given how much the scholarly apparatus has to intrude upon the actual text, so it's not a book anyone will want to read as their first encounter with Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny".

I'm intrigued by Penguin's re-issue of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? not only because I had never heard of it or because it is billed as the first Mexican-American novel, but because it tells the story of a Mexican girl raised by Apaches who ends up in New England amidst hypocritical abolitionists.I don't usually find a plot to be the most intriguing things about a novel, but that's a plot that intrigues me!

Finally, among the books you may not have heard of, sits my friend Caroline Nesbitt's horse novel, Ride on the Curl'd Clouds, which I am curious to read not because I know anything about horses (I don't), but because I've known Caroline and her writing for years. One of these days I'll get around to interviewing her about the book and about her decision to publish it via Lulu.com, a decision she and I talked about a lot -- Caroline had previously published a nonfiction book in the traditional way, but we thought she might be able to have more success publishing her novel herself and marketing it within the equestrian community, a world she knows well.

The other books are there because at one point or another they seemed interesting to me and so I hope to get to time to read at least some of them. We shall see...